Image Bloat @ Jimsky's Emporium

Trim Those Image File Sizes

One of the main reasons your web page down-loads slowly, is
the size of the image files on your page. You will find that most
of your images are crammed full with colours you don't need.
If you 'optimise' your images and take out the excess
colours then you can dramatically reduce the size of you image
files.

I have given 2 examples below from my own site so you can
really see it works. You'll be hard pushed to spot the
difference.

Two Photo jpegs - Before and after
optimisation.
Original file size 17.2kb - after optimisation 9.96kb.

Two buttons gifs. Before
and after optimisation.
Original file size 2.08kb. After
optimisation 859bytes.

Now - if you compound all the savings - from all the optimised
images - you can produce a HUGE saving on a whole page and if I
take my own "index.html" page as an example:-

Before optimisation - page size (html)=19kb.
Images=44kb. Total Page size= 63kb.
This gave a download time on a 28.8 modem of about 21 secs.

After optimisation - page size (html)=19kb.
Images=20kb. Total Page size= 39kb.
This gave a download time on a 28.8 modem of about 12.5 secs.

Now 7.5 seconds might not sound a lot to you - but its the
difference between a page visitor staying or going elsewhere at
times!!

SO HOW DO I DO IT

Well this really is the easy bit .... lol. If you go to The
Netmechanic GIFBot or Virtually
Ignorant you can optimize all your images for free. Can you
get easier than that ?? Just put in your page url - it brings up
all the images on your page - click on the image you want to
optimise - then you are given about 10 choices at varying degrees
of colour reduction - choose the one you want and download it to
your computer - then rename the image file to what you want. Easy !